Hearst Ordeal Relived In Lean, Chilling Saga

The kidnapping and political conversion of California publishing heiress Patty Hearst was one of the most sensational news stories of the 1970s.

Lurid, fantastic and baffling, it also was a story without a decisive conclusion. Even after Hearst had been recovered (and subsequently imprisoned), a disturbing ambiguity clung to her story.

Now, controversial director Paul Schrader has made a movie, Patty Hearst, that reopens the same questions of truth vs. fiction that have surrounded the events since their beginnings. Hearst`s book, Every Secret Thing, is the basis for Nicholas Kazan`s lean, straightforward screenplay.

The movie takes you places where you may not want to go -- through the chilling horror of being a captive and a victim of brainwashing for months on end.

Don`t expect answers, despite the fact that it is Hearst`s perspective that shapes the film`s events. Perhaps she was a canny survivor -- an artful prevaricator who was good at fooling her kidnappers. Empathy for what she experienced is the intention of Schrader, who doesn`t judge his passive heroine. Yet, there is room to puzzle over -- if not criticize -- her actions.

This psychological drama works best during the film`s early scenes. The peaceful college life of Hearst was overturned forever when members of a radical group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, invaded her apartment on a February night in 1974. While her fiance, Steven Weed, escaped, she was carried screaming from the building and put into the trunk of a car.

Hearst feared being buried alive -- and it is debatable whether something worse happened, as she lost her identity in the ensuing months. Locked in a closet and blindfolded, Hearst was forced to measure days and nights by the opening of the closet door. Her indoctrination began with harsh words from Cinque (Ving Rhames), the black leader of the small cadre of white, middle- class followers. Hearst`s father, Randolph, was called ``a corporate enemy of America`` and was coerced into a food giveaway program that turned into a fiasco.

Public sympathy for Hearst shifted when, six weeks after her capture, she was a gun-toting participant in a San Francisco bank robbery. The movie makes it plain that she went along to save her skin.

But as the rechristened Tania, Hearst remained aloof from the other SLA members, who gradually came to embrace this fragile-looking girl in more ways than one.

The truest line of dialogue is when Hearst makes an unscripted audiotape to her parents: ``I`m right in the middle.``

It`s as if she were a frightened sleepwalker, unwilling to cross the people in charge. Had she had a stronger personality, it is likely that she would have wound up in a ditch (which is shown to have dominated her fears). Her captors were rough characters.

As sensational as the real-life story was, Schrader doesn`t over-dramatize it. He lets the strange events speak for themselves. He also allows room to speculate on the motivations of SLA members` actions. Like many young people in the `60s and `70s, these middle-class outcasts were searching for a sense of their own power. They believed they could effect drastic changes on society.

Natasha Richardson, recently seen in A Month in the Country, is splendid as Hearst. She conveys her character`s utter terror without resorting to theatrics. As her political antithesis, Frances Fisher (Yolanda) also is notable.

Patty Hearst may not bring the filmgoer to any decisive conclusions about the events or the young woman at the heart of them. But it does shed light on the process of kidnapping for the victim -- a process with which we`re all too familiar as terrorism increases around the world.

PATTY HEARST

After an heiress is kidnapped, she joins the revolutionary activities of her captors.

With Natasha Richardson, William Forsythe, Frances Fisher.

Directed by Paul Schrader. Written by Nicholas Kazan from the book, Every Secret Thing, by Patricia Campbell Hearst.